Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Public Policy Polling's findings about how Jim Hunt and Jesse Helms are viewed these days (Hunt with an edge, but not a huge one) was a reminder of the epic 1984 battle between the two symbols of North Carolina's competing schools of political thought.

Going into that race, Hunt, the two-term governor who was seen as a rising star of the Democratic Party, held an early and seemingly commanding lead over the two-term Republican senator. But Helms -- who never lost a statewide race in his five terms in the Senate (1973-2003) -- made up ground fast and defeated Hunt in the 1984 general election, the only defeat Hunt suffered in six statewide races beginning with his successful campaign for lieutenant governor the same year Helms first won the Senate race and his four successful runs for governor. Helms, of course, died last summer; Hunt remains quite active in setting and shaping the public policy agenda in this state.

No way to prove this, but I always thought that North Carolina voters liked Hunt's optimism, energy and can-do approach to education, while they also liked Helms' penny-pinching ways when it came to the federal budget and his distrust of a powerful central government. My working theory was that in any Hunt-Helms matchup beyond 1984, voters would stand by Jesse in a Senate contest but stick with Jim in any race for governor.

Here's Tom Jensen's analysis:

Jesse Helms may have beat out Jim Hunt at the polls when they faced off for the Senate in 1984, but when it comes to who North Carolinians say they have a higher opinion of now, the former Governor is winning out 43-37.

That fact has a lot to do with the changing demography of the state. Among natives of North Carolina Helms has the better legacy, 42-41. But with folks who have moved into the state Hunt has a substantial 45-31 lead.

The numbers break down pretty much as you would expect. Liberals, moderates, women, urban and suburban voters, and African Americans all have a more favorable view of Hunt. Conservatives, whites, men, and rural voters all prefer Helms.

The results are not quite as polarized along party lines as one might expect. 16% of Democrats say they have a better opinion of Helms, an indication that even though the influence of the Jessecrats has clearly been diluted, as evidence by Barack Obama's victory in the state last fall, they're not completely gone. At the same time, 16% of Republicans say they have a more favorable view of Hunt. That is particularly true among non-native Republicans, 25% of whom say they like Hunt more.

I think this poll actually says a fair amount about where North Carolina is today politically. When we decided to ask this question I expected Hunt to win by a much larger margin, and I think the further into history we go the more favorably Hunt will be viewed in these types of comparisons. But the reality is that even though the state is turning in a more progressive direction, shifting the pendulum to Hunt after he lost to Helms at the polls, there is still a very strong conservative base of voters in the state whose influence will remain strong if not necessarily dominant moving forward.

28 comments:

It took me only until 1978, Sen. Helms' first re-election campaign, to realize just how strong politically Jesse Helms was across the state of North Carolina, even among Democrats who didn't consider themselves all that conservative. I learned about this on a Manteo-to-Murphy campaign hike in 1977 the year before the 1978 Democratic senatorial primary in which I was a candidate.

Jim Hunt's statewide organization was nothing short of awesome throughout his years as lieutenant governor (1973-1977) and governor (1977-1985 and 1993-2001), but nobody could match Sen. Helms' knowledge of communities across the state and the people from leadership levels to rank-and-file voters. If Hunt had challenged Helms for the Senate in any year besides 1984, what with President Reagan running for re-election and the national and state Democratic parites in disarray, Hunt might have prevailed. But even so, it would have been quite a fight.

The Democrats backed themselves into a corner in 1984 with the outgoing governor, Jim Hunt, running simultaneously for the Senate while the party's nominee for governor, Rufus Edmisten, was facing long odds in pulling together several factions of the N.C. Democratic Party after two tough gubernatorial primaries while still having to play a certain amount of second fiddle to the Hunt senatorial campaign which commanded most of the fundraising and organizational attention that year.

And you'd have to say that Congressman Jim Martin's excellent campaign for the governorship in 1984 may actually have helped Sen. Helms's Senate campaign somewhat in the Piedmont and West though that point could be debated by Republican insiders.

All in all, the Helms difference, politically speaking in my view, was that neither the more liberal newspaper editorialists nor his Democratic opponents ever really took into account his many years of "mainstream" political ties to the North Carolina business community dating back to his tenure as executive director of the N.C. Banking Commission in the 1950s. Yes indeed, Jesse Helms was quite conservative on an entire range of national issues through the last third of the 20th Century, but he had connections to leaders of cities, towns and rural communities which helped him considerably at election time, across party lines, no matter what the preliminary polls were saying in any given re-election year.

In short, all these analyses of the political components of the Hunt-Helms matchup and the subsequent popular standing of both men in the years to follow failed to recognize that, conservative as he was on certain key issues before the country during that time, Helms was every bit as much of a "mainstream conservative" within the N.C. Republican Party that Sen. Sam J. Ervin Jr. was always understood to be within the N.C. Democratic Party.

Indeed, looking at today's problems in just one important area in North Carolina--banking and finance--one can reasonably ask if either our leading newspapers, including The Observer, or the state's Democratic and Republican parties are up to the task of protecting our N.C. banks from the bureaucratic disaster which would result from "nationalization."

The Senate could use some of Jesse Helms' business and banking philosophy right about now especially if liberal Democrats in Congress fail to act responsibly in respecting and relating to the fundamental missions and needs of a successful 21st Century banking community from the largest cities to the smallest towns across this country.

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About This Blog

Jack Betts is an Observer associate editor who has written
about North Carolina since graduating from UNC Chapel Hill in 1968. A former
Pentagon photographer and Washington correspondent for Landmark newspapers,
Betts was Raleigh Bureau Chief for the Greensboro Daily News and editor of
North Carolina Insight magazine before joining the Observer in 1992.